Wine Front-End development

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 07:54:12PM -0400, Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 16:17 +0100, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > 
> > I seriously doubt that as far as users are concerned that dependencies
> > would be an issue, the user in general just wants something that
> > works, and they don't care that 4 extra dependancies are required
> > (python, gtk, pygtk, pygtk-glade)
> 
> For what is worth, I personally think you've made the best choice of
> tools for this project. The problem with the "least common denominator"
> approaches is that you get a sub-par result. Don't let the rhetoric slow
> you down. 

I'm also voting for not going with a C-only version here.
It's important to stand on the shoulder of giants and use what's there already.
Using C code for a frontend with complex interactions with various subsystems
where you'd have to re-code several parts on your own again just doesn't sound
right.
One should go with a *useful* GUI toolkit and decide this based on its
distribution prevalence and its features. One could even see this as a positive
vote *for* a certain toolkit, and given some time and a wise choice it will
turn out that more and more applications chose the same toolkit thus making it
a pretty permanent feature of any Linux distribution. 
That's just the natural way of OSS development evolution: stuff that's good will
be re-used over and over again, and stuff that's not good will die very quickly
(incidentally thus punishing those projects that didn't choose a GUI toolkit
wisely), and stuff that's worse than a newcomer will get deprecated eventually
once the newcomer is fully established.

All this means that it's most likely a bad idea to go back to the 80s and code
a complex GUI app which has to interface to all sorts of standard Linux desktop
services(!) in C again, unless there's a complete and rich interface to all
required services available, which I doubt.

Andreas Mohr